In a Congressional committee hearing, the author of the Patriot Act threatened to orchestrate a movement to not reauthorize the controversial post-9/11 law.

In a session of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr (R-WI) said that given the government’s muted response to the Snowden leaks—particularly regarding the bulk metadata collection authorized under Section 215—the White House needs to make further changes.

Speaking to Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who appeared before the committee, Sensenbrenner gave a stern warning.

“Section 215 expires in June of next year,” Sensenbrenner said, according to The Hill. “Unless Section 215 is fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will end up getting nothing because I am absolutely confident that there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize 215.”

The vast majority of the records collected will have no relation to the investigation of terrorism at all. This collection of millions of unrelated records is built-in to the mass call collection program. Defendants’ theory of “relevance” is simply beyond any reasonable understanding of the word. And it certainly is not what amicus intended the word to mean.

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Defendants do not explain why Congress would have enacted such meaningless provisions. The bulk data collection program is unbounded in its scope. The NSA is gathering on a daily basis the details of every call that every American makes, as well as every call made by foreigners to or from the United States. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?

In the Tuesday hearing, other committee members chimed in with their agreements, as well, including from Democrats.

“This is a tool that gives us one of those pieces of information, the connections from one person to another,” he said. “Although we continue to believe the program is lawful, we recognize that it has raised significant controversial and legitimate privacy concerns, and as I have said, we are working on developing a new approach as the president has directed.”

For now, federal judges have been split on the program's legality, and it is almost certain to be heard eventually by the United States Supreme Court.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar